“Of course.”
“I quit years ago, but I still get the urge on occasion.” I lit up and exhaled a plume of smoke that a breeze swept toward the sea wall. “I’m meeting my friends for dinner tonight. At Baldassaro’s. They’re all bringing someone, and…well, I didn’t want to come alone. I thought Giacinta would make a charming dinner companion.”
Hearing her name, Giacinta again asked for a translation and, following a brief exchange, Allessandra said, “There is a thing I don’t understand, Mister…You…”
“Taylor,” I said. “Please.”
“Very well. Taylor.” She stressed the T with a flick of her tongue, crossed her legs and lit another cigarette. “You are a man of wealth, of experience. And very handsome. Many beautiful women would be happy to take dinner with you. Especially at a place of elegance like Baldassaro’s. So why have you choosed this one?”
I had a sip of wine. “I assumed that Giacinta invited you for drinks so she could ask questions through you and make a judgment on my character. But this is your question, isn’t it?”
Allessandra made a wry shape with her mouth and gave the slightest of nods.
“Perhaps you would care to go to dinner with me?”
“Another night…” She gave her hair a toss. “It’s possible.”
A Vespa with a pair of young men astride passed along the street—I allowed the angry rip of the engine to fade before continuing.
“You’re a beautiful woman, Allessandra. I’m sure any man would be delighted to have you as a companion. However, I’m looking for a certain type of beauty. Beauty that falls short of the ideal. Innocence that’s been corrupted, but only just. A woman who’s been slighted by the world, perhaps treated roughly, yet maintains a belief in romantic possibility.”
Giacinta, seeming to recognize that Allessandra was flirting with me, plucked at her friend’s sleeve. Her purpose in having me meet Allessandra had less to do with ascertaining my good character than with showing me off, and now she was afraid that she had made a mistake.
Allessandra told her to wait a second and said, “Your picture of…What you say about the woman…uh…”
“Description. Is that the word you’re looking for?”
“Yes. Your description…it fits every woman.”
“Yes, but Giacinta possesses this quality in a way you do not. If I were to send her to a spa, have experts counsel her on matters of diet and exercise, perhaps get some work done to her chin, her breasts, she’d be very much the kind of woman you are. As it is, she’s the absolute embodiment of the quality I’m seeking. Her body and mind flavored by a precise degree of sadness.”
Allessandra’s frown took the measure of some poignant indelicacy, as if she detected a bad smell. “It seems you are a connoisseur, a…I don’t know how to say. Your feeling for Gia is not…” She snapped her fingers in frustration.
“You’re suggesting that my appreciation of Giacinta’s charms may be perverse? Like a preference for dwarves or the morbidly obese? Why don’t you tell her that?”
Once again Allessandra had to hold off Giacinta’s demand that she be filled in, saying forcefully, “Aspetta!”
“I’m attracted to plain women,” I said. “Physical beauty bores me. I’m talking about what’s generally considered beautiful. And now that beauty’s become affordable…” I made a disparaging noise. “That qualifies me as jaded, not perverse. Still, it may be a phase I’m going through. Tomorrow night, for instance, I may feel differently.”
For a second or two, Allessandra looked puzzled. Then she shook her finger at me in mock chastisement and laughed. “You fool with me!” she said. “I know!”
She turned to her friend and delivered herself of a lengthy pronouncement detailing our conversation or, more likely, a fictive version of it, darting sideways glances at me as if to affirm an unstated complicity. Judging by Giacinta’s tremulous smile, I suspected Allessandra was informing her that I’d been attracted to her mental and spiritual qualities, that she could consider herself safe while in my company, and that she could expect nothing more threatening to her virtue than a fine meal at Baldassaro’s—in sum, diminishing the importance of the evening, so that when I asked Allessandra out, something both women were certain I would do, Giacinta would not be so distressed.
Shortly afterward, Allessandra took her leave, seizing the opportunity of a perfunctory embrace to slip her business card into my jacket pocket, and, once she had rounded the corner, an act preceded by a wave, coquettishly fluttering her fingers, Giacinta’s mood grew instantly sullen and uncommunicative. I caressed her forearm, asked if she was all right, and she shook her head, refusing to look at me. “Giacinta,” I said softly, making the name into a form of adoration, and held her hand, pressing my lips to the inside of her wrist, to the rapid pulse beating there, the smell of blood and lemons. With palpable reluctance, she swung about to face me and, after I laid my hand along her cheek, letting her lean into it, only then did she relent and favor me with a wan smile.
Toward the southern extremity of the Via Poseidone, an ancient stone causeway extended several hundred yards out into the sea, connecting the mainland with a small island, almost invisible against the night sky, picked out by the lights of Baldassaro’s. In addition to a four-star restaurant, the island was home to some nondescript Roman ruins that attracted a few tourists, but no one had lived there for over a century, thus it was ideal for our meeting. The causeway itself, however, was populated by a number of young couples who had come for a twilight stroll and stayed to exploit the anonymity of the dark. Every few yards we passed a shadowy couple locked in an embrace or whispering with their heads together. I had slipped a drug into Giacinta’s wine back at the café, a hypnotic designed to lower inhibitions, and, upon finding an unoccupied stretch of railing, when I suggested we take our ease along it, she raised no objection. Perhaps she would have raised none in any case. If she had, I could have persuaded her with a mental nudge; but I never have liked manipulating them in that way—it tends to damage them and it might have cost me some effort. These Italian girls, whether due to Catholic fear or fleshly anxiety, were capable of reconstituting their virginity at a moment’s notice. And so I trusted the drug to liberate her from such impediments.
We gazed out across the Mediterranean, lying flat beneath a salting of dim stars. I asked Giacinta to talk, telling her I liked the sound of her voice, although I understood little of what she said (a message that required some considerable time to convey, due to its relative complexity). She hesitated, but I urged her on and soon she started in reciting poetry like a schoolgirl regurgitating memorized verses on cue. After three poems she faltered, but then began speaking rapidly in a husky tone of voice. To my amusement, I recognized several vulgar words, words such as “pompino” and “cazzo”, that I had learned from a woman in Bologna. I put my right hand on the join of her waist and hip, and her breath caught; she half-turned so that my hand slid up onto her rib cage, very near the swell of her breast. Her voice thickened and her speech became peppered with crudities, particular emphasis being laid on terms like “…mi fica…” and “…mi culo…” and so forth, references to portions of her anatomy upon which, I assumed, she wished me to lavish attention.
I was delighted to play a game with her, with someone so similar to and yet so vastly different from the women with whom I was accustomed to playing a more involving game. I kissed her, tasting wine and licorice from her tongue. My hand engulfed a breast, squeezing it a trifle hard, perhaps, for I felt her mouth slacken momentarily. I lifted her by the waist, boosted her up to sit upon the stone railing, and pushed her skirt up around her hips. She protested, of course, pushing feebly at my chest and saying, “No, Taylor! Non in questo!” But the distinction between passion and its counterfeit had blurred for us both. I fingered her panties to one side and, finding her ready, entered her. She clung to my shoulders, gasping with each thrust. I forced her to lie back, suspending her over the drop—twenty feet, I reckoned it. All that prevented her from falling was our genital union and my hands supporting her waist. She cried out…not loudly. Modesty was still a concern. She did not want to be caught, yet she needed this validation so desperately, this romantic violence in the service of her self-image, that she was willing to risk her reputation, not to mention her life, and entrust herself to a stranger’s whim.